Now, missionaries and conquerors are men, on the whole, more imbued with their own importance and sanctity, and less disposed to consider consequences, than almost any other classes of mankind. The conjunction of the two in one disposed the _conquistadores_ of America to imagine that, no matter how cruel or outrageous their treatment of the Indians was, they atoned for all by the introduction of what they considered the blessing of the knowledge of the true faith. It will be seen at once that, if one can determine with accuracy which of the many ‘faiths’ preached about the world is actually the true faith, a man who is in possession of it is acting properly in endeavouring to diffuse it. The meanest soldier in the various armies which left Spain to conquer America seems to have had no doubt about the matter. Bernal Diaz del Castillo, who, as he himself relates, came to America at the age of eighteen, and therefore could have had little previous opportunity of studying theology, and who, moreover, was unfitted to do so by the want of knowledge of Latin, to which he himself confesses, yet at the end of his history of the conquest of Mexico, one of the most interesting books ever written, has the following passage: ‘But it is to be noted that, after God, it was we, the real conquerors, who discovered them [the Indians] and conquered them; and from the first we took away their idols, and taught them our holy doctrine, and to us is due the reward and credit of it all, before any other people, even though they be churchmen: for when the beginning is good, the middle and ending is good, which the curious [_i.e._, attentive] reader may see in the Christian polity and justice which we showed them in New Spain. ‘And I will leave the matter, and tell the other benefits which, after God, by our agency, came to the natives of New Spain.’[14]